Because the intervention of a neutral third party is currently gaining favor as an alternative form of dispute resolution, this book explores the process of mediation in the context of managing struggle and examines some of the characteristics of mediators, their training and ethics, and the techniques and skills of good mediation. The theory…

To analyze the usefulness of forensics judges' written comments and to understand how to improve ballots, a content analysis of 175 ballots from schools in a competition district was conducted. Categories for analysis included the following: (1) quantity of comments; (2) format of the ballot; (3) types of comments (including selection,…

Noting that little is known about how communication functions in alcoholic families, and about the effects of this alcoholic home environment on children of alcoholics, their communication patterns, and their relationships, this paper identifies strengths and weaknesses in existing literature on the alcoholic family and children of alcoholics. In…

The effectiveness of a social skills training workshop was assessed by comparing the rated competence of participants in an Interpersonal Skills Training Program to the rated competence of nonparticipants. Subjects' self-ratings were included. This comparison was operationalized through a pretest-posttest design with 12 experimental and 22 control…

A study was conducted to analyze the role that nonverbal communication plays in classroom climate. A 40-item classroom communication climate questionnaire was developed, and administered to 76 students and 8 teachers to determine its reliability and validity. After several changes and deletions, the final version of the questionnaire was…

The Communication Competency Assessment Instrument (CCAI) was developed as a college-level communication competence measure. However, because the listening portion of the CCAI requires individual testing and is not practical for large-scale testing situations, an additional multiple choice measure was developed. In a study conducted at Kent State…

This study was designed to determine forensics students' ability to predict accurately how judges they knew from previous tournaments would rank them in rounds of competitive individual events. The study examined the following hypotheses: (1) contestants can predict how they will do in rounds of competition; and (2) contestants in prepared oral…

A study continued a series of empirical investigations into the psychological criteria people use to determine whether or not to make particular arguments. Two hundred volunteers enrolled in a required public-speaking course (1) responded to several demographic questions, (2) described the persuasive choices they would make in the scenario…

To test the cross-cultural validity of uncertainty reduction theory, a study was conducted using students from South Korea and the United States who were chosen to represent high- and low-context cultures respectively. Uncertainty reduction theory is based upon the assumption that the primary concern of strangers upon meeting is one of uncertainty…

Intended for those new to the study of organizational communication, this revised annotated bibliography cites books and articles selected on the basis of clarity and comprehensiveness in providing background material or critical perspectives on organizational communication. The 27 citations in the bibliography focus on original literature…

Because item order and salience may affect the findings of social science research, a study was conducted to determine the effect of topic salience on subject response to different item orders. In the study, 10 high salience self-esteem items were presented with 10 low salience items concerning product labels in three versions. In the first…

Based on the assumptions that relational messages are multidimensional and that they are largely communicated by nonverbal cues, this experiment manipulated five nonverbal cues--eye contact, proximity, body lean, smiling, and touch--to determine what meanings they convey along four relational message dimensions: emotionality/arousal/composure,…

A model was developed positing four factors as having a determinant influence on the desire of Mexicans for future economic relationships between their country and the United States. The factors, previously identified as occupying a central position in intercultural communication, are perceptions of shared interests, threats, homophily, and…

A study was conducted to examine the presence and composition of nonverbal cues exhibited in a spontaneous dyadic interaction and to investigate the assumption that cue variation is inconsequential to the effect of nonverbal behavior implicit in methods that aggregate cue incidence across interactions. Subjects, 110 college undergraduates, worked…

A study investigated the relationships among the social perception processes, person-centered communicative strategies, and the mediating factors of empathy and context-relevant beliefs of physicians. Subjects, 46 first-year medical students, were first interviewed on a series of structured tasks that assessed their constructs for perceiving…